Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I installed a pre-release version of Windows 7 to play with – I’m actually supposed to know what I’m talking about when I dis the next version of Windows ;-), and the second impression is what the title is about: it just behaves and looks more like Mac OS-X then all previous Windows releases.

(more…)

[Update: initially I thought this problem was limited to IE7 and earlier, I was wrong and it also happens in Internet Explorer 8. Kind of destroys what ever expectations I’ve had remaining for IE8]

Although Internet Explorer 8 was already released¹ most users are going to stick to previous versions – I know this for a fact as even though Internet Explorer 7 is already more than a couple of years on the market it still only has slightly better then 50% of the Internet Explorer market (not including other browsers).

That being said, its always “fun” finding more Internet Explorer bugs, something which the web developer I’m working with is proficient in (which she isn’t really doing on purpose – I’m not sure if it counts in her favor or not 🙂 ), so here is the latest one she stumbled upon²: (more…)

1. and it boasts a superior rendering engine – which is almost on par with  Firefox 3: it breaks horribly in the WordPress edit post dialog – its the first serious rendering problem I’ve seen with IE8 [↩]
2. I haven’t documented the several previous ones we encountered – I might do so in the future [↩]

I’m not much of a music listener – I don’t like to listen to music idly and I’d rather much listen to talk shows when I’m doing things that do not require absolute concentration – for example while driving, cooking or doing house chores. A couple of years ago I found that podcasts are very handy in those situations – when you are away from a computer and there is nothing interesting on the radio (the demise of the radio talk show would be a subject of a different post). My current podcatching setup I think would interest people, but I’ll also leave that for another post.

Today I want to discuss a new podcast that just started¹: Free as in node.

(more…)

1. I’m a bit late on the bandwagon – the first episode was released two weeks ago, and they already have a second episode which I haven’t listened to yet [↩]

Its that time of the year again, and we are back in Linux release season. The usual suspects are all here again except for openSUSE who moved to a funky 8-month~year release cycle (I’m not sure they know what release schedule they’re using).

I’ve been testing the pre-releases of Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 (haven’t had a chance to test Mandriva 2009.1 which is a shame because I used to really like Mandriva) and my impressions are as follows:

(more…)

[Sorry about this Israel-specific post being in English – its just so annoys me and I want the rest of the world to know about this.]

Israel has on general very good road – compared to many modern countries (in Europe and North America): national roads are all at least dual carriageways with many of them triple carriageway or even more; roads are mostly lighted at night except maybe single carriageway roads in rural areas; even road maintenance which was historically horrible in Israel is pretty good now days.

That being said, the state of driving in Israel is horrendous – people simple have no road courtesy whatsoever! The most common annoyance I have with traffic in Israel is that on a triple carriageway, where you have three lanes to choose from, the slowest one (which often has average speeds way under the low Israeli speed limit) is the middle one! If you’re just driving along at about the speed limit (maybe a few km/h over it, I can’t pretend I’m a saint), then you normally would be driving on the rightmost lane, passing people on your left. Very very annoying, not to say dangerous near interchanges. More ludicrous is that if you are in a real hurry and want to drive at speed that will normally get you a speeding tickets, you also mostly drive on the right most lane – as the left lane is occupied by people who think they are the fastest on the road but in actuality only drive around 100 km/h.

And all that before we discuss drivers switching lanes without signaling, driving on the center between two lanes, breaking abruptly for no obvious reasons, and the most annoying behavior – being the first car at a stop light the driver stops about 2 car-lengths away from the stop line. I have no idea why they do that, except for increasing the likelihood of a traffic jam this serves no purpose I can understand.

I hate Israeli drivers.

This is another “how to” tech article, anyone who is not interested in such things may stop reading now.

VirtualBox is a great virtualization software (hypervisor as the lingo currently goes) – I believe it matches up nicely against the current VMWare Workstation line and they offer both an open source version which is free for any use as well as a commercial version (with some added features such as SATA support) that is free for personal use.

VirtualBox allows you to take snapshots of the current VM state so that you can safely return to a previous state of your VM if you messed something up (for example – installed too much software on your Windows XP VM). Unfortunately, unlike what the VirtualBox UI will have you think, the snapshot features allows you to take progressive snapshots but you can’t fork your snapshot tree – you can’t create branches off old snapshots. Snapshots which are not current can be either discarded (have their state merged into another state) or reverted too (discard all the newest data and return to the old state).

Additionally, you can’t copy (clone) VMs with snapshots except copying the oldest state¹.

(more…)

1. which is most often not what you want. If you don’t mind discarding all of the old snapshots, you can clone the current VMs state using the method described in this VirtualBox forum thread [↩]

ושוב עברו עוד 4 שנים… אהם… 3 שנים… אהם שתיים וקצת.. ושוב מערכת בחירות לא ברורה. והפעם, אני מצביע בצבא מה שמונע את הדילמה הנוראית של מה לעשות בשאר יום החופש שקיבלתי אחרי ההצבעה – בצבא אין חופש, אז אני אתרוצץ בין טנקים.

(more…)

Running any search on Google.com, at the moment, including searching for “google” may come up with all results marked This site may harm your computer:

(more…)

I’ve started uploading the pictures from the Ireland trip Karen and me took on October (after I gave up on getting all the pictures arranged and labeled with Karen’s help). Look for them in the “October, 2008” album (you can access the gallery quickly using the big “Pictures” tab at the top).

Not everything has yet uploaded (less then half at this time) and what has went up may be out of order so take care when navigating through the photos. One reason to upload it now is that I’m going on reserves duty on Sunday and that is sure to generate a lot more new photographs – it seems that I only practice photography these days on two occasions: either when I’m abroad or in the army (which for some reason at least one of my coworkers keep confusing the two 🙂 ).

Updated: all the pictures were uploaded – a bit less then what I expected: after initial pruning we are at about 1400 pictures, and possibly there are still some redundant pictures that I need to remove. The pictures should be mostly in the correct order, except for the problem that we were using two cameras whose timestamps are a few hours off – so the Powershot pictures should always be after all of the Nikon pictures.

In continuation to my on-off love affair with smart phones (and after another one of my office coworkers fell prey to the dangers of the iPhone¹ ), after I finally got my Nokia E90 charged – after it has been mostly off for the last two months or so, during which I found that the Ericsson P1i does about everything better then the E90, except SSH as I just can’t get the UIQ Putty to work and it doesn’t look like anyone is developing it anymore², the P1i even comes with games installed (at least one anyway) unlike the E90 – I actually used Fring on the E90 today for its almost intended purpose, as I was sitting in a cafe, after purposefully leaving the computer in the car, and chatting on Google Talk with both a friend and my fiancé (who was – interestingly enough – far away on the other side of table 😉 ), and its actually quite cool even if incredibly battery draining: in 2 hours of really not intensive chatting I went through almost half of the Nokia’s rather large battery.

Anyway, sorry for the eclectic post – I’ve moved the blog to Amazon EC2 service and I’m going on a 3 week army reserve duty on Sunday. It might take a while until you see this new post as I’ve just changed the DNS entries a couple of hours ago (I really missed SSH on the E90 🙂 ) but once the update runs through you should have access to the new and improved (virtual) server that would hopefully be much faster.

1. What danger? oooh – another silly app that just shows a different picture when you shake the phone. Seriously – it looks like the company only operates at 50% efficiency now. [↩]
2. Also – initially I though that I’m lacking a TAB key, but apparently its very easy to graffiti any char you’re missing on the keyboard, and surprisingly enough – also TAB [↩]